


The Endgame

by SkySamuelle



Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: F/M, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-30
Updated: 2015-07-30
Packaged: 2018-04-12 01:39:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4460381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SkySamuelle/pseuds/SkySamuelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bizarrely, Bonnie does not understand why she no longer dislikes Damon all that much until he gets with Elena.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Endgame

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Bamon Drabble Party at bubbly_fics. Prompt: "Teardrops on My Guitar" by Taylor Swift.

Bizarrely, Bonnie does not understand why she no longer dislikes Damon all that much until he does get Elena. Even then, the witch manages to convince herself that the sickly feeling of inherent wrongness she gets when she sees her best friend and her worst enemy together is all because of Stefan. Somehow Katherine has managed to truly convince Elena that she and Stefan are an unfinished and never ending affair, and the younger Salvatore is now more unstable than ever.

Bonnie tries her best to fix the situation because mending the broken was always her vocation wherever Damon Salvatore _wasn’t_ concerned. She insists on becoming Stefan’s confidante even if the vampire fights her every step of the way: she admires his struggle against his nature too much to let Katherine Pierce destroy him.

She insists on remaining Elena’s friend even when it starts to feel like Damon is turning her surrogate sister into someone she barely knows. Even when she feels disappointed and nearly disgusted that Elena can label as boyfriend a monster who tried to kill both her best friends, snapped her little brother’s neck and fucked and turned into a freaking vampire her biological mother. Bonnie has shudders every time she contemplates all of it, and she tries hard to not question how Elena can just go ahead feeling only feebly conflicted. Denial doesn’t work all that well when she can read the same questions reflected into Stefan’s gaze.

“I expected better from both of them,” he confesses once, voice dark and knuckles tight.

“I know,” she answers simply, trying to convey the exact depth of her understanding through her gaze as she puts her hand on his shoulder in comfort. This is how Bonnie realizes that, however impossible it is to comprehend, she actually expected better than this from both Elena _and_ Damon. Family is supposed to matter more than girl troubles and she had gotten used to Damon and Stefan’s mutually derisive bickering in the background of her life.

Bonnie does not understand how Elena could have cared for both brothers so much and yet destroyed so imprudently all the recent rebuilding of their shaky relationship, switching to Damon after giving up on Stefan.

She is not surprised when Stefan says he has decided to leave – she felt him retreating from every connection he had to the town day by day ever so subtly, and she only feels guilt that she wasn’t enough to help him. As she hugs him goodbye she feels more alone and panicked than she ever thought possible.

\--

When Elena discovers Stefan is gone, the brunette breaks and cries into Bonnie’s arms for three hours, suffocating her sobs like her pain is some guilty secret. They don’t talk about it afterwards. For the first time, Bonnie feels that the harder she tries to hold things together, the harder things fall apart.

Katherine disappears from their radar shortly after but Bonnie’s anguish doesn’t leave with Elena’s doppelganger.

Damon and Elena’s relationship becomes this huge angst-fest where Damon passive-aggressively encourages Elena to be more Katherine-like, despite his claim of loving her because she is nothing like his sire, while Elena keeps grooming him to respond to life in a more ‘Stefan-like’ way, although she claims being over her former boyfriend.

Bonnie is pulled in the middle, and in this uncomfortable position she finds herself spending more time with Damon than she has ever wanted to. Surprisingly, on the surface their relationship changes very little: she still fiercely disapproves of him and he still fiercely enjoys provoking her. Yet something must be different too, because sometimes she can’t breathe when he walks by and touches her, always grasping and grabbing at her arms, shoulders, waist–his hands gentle but firm-when there’s no apparent need for it. She is sort of learning to envy how comfortable he is in his skin, even when he is wrong, and how easily he can invent his set of rules to live by, when she is always questioning and reforming her precious ethics.

She certainly envies how fearless he has always been in fighting for his love, no matter how desperate the quest, when she can’t even admit to herself that she is in love without suffering a massive panic attack.

She ignores her misgivings, her dreams of Stefan coming back to Elena’s door with haunted eyes and Elena wrapping her arms eagerly around him with happy tears on her cheeks. Bonnie wants to believe that Damon will find his measure of peace with her best friend, because if it doesn’t happen then she will lose him to the darkness he still struggles to contain.

The charade ends as she starts packing for college visits. Bonnie and Caroline excitedly started to plan in detail a road trip to tour their favorite destinations. Damon had been avoiding her most determinedly as soon she had started to draft projects of leaving Mystic Falls, and it was a sad kind of relief.

A raven flies in through her bedroom window one night after dinner and the witch raises her eyebrows in annoyance at the handsome man sitting on her bed. It doesn’t matter that her heart skipped a beat at the sight of him so comfortable in her room – he is not hers and he won’t ever be and she made her peace with that. It will stop hurting soon or so she is trying to convince herself.

There are clothes and a travel bag spread on her bed beside and behind where Damon’s sitting – proof that she is packing and looking forward to the next phase of her life.

“So you’re really going,” he reprimands her patronizingly, almost like he’s taking offense at her determination to cultivate plans of which he silently disapproved.

“Obviously,” she answers, determined to not allow the vampire to rile her up.

“I thought you and Elena were going to be attached at the hip as long as you were alive.”

Bonnie shrugs, hiding a pang of senseless disappointment behind her poker face. “It’s time to cut the umbilical cord.”

“You need each other.”

“Like you and Stefan did?”

She instantly cringes and shakes her head nervously, cursing her stupid tongue for snapping _that._ It’s too much exposure, and she wants to keep believing Damon is blind to her less hostile feelings.

The vampire, unexpectedly, shakes his head lightly and bypasses her slip completely. “You can’t leave,” he repeats simply, glaring like he could just cow her into submission or like he is trying to look astonished at her sheer foolishness of wanting a life far away from this cursed place.

“I can’t wait to leave this hell-hole,” she glares right back boldly, crossing her arms defensively before her chest because she feels that strange, confusing vibe between them again, and she should know better than to expect itmeans anything at all.

Damon is not hers and the sooner she accepts it, the sooner she will be free.

But he is in her face within a breath’s space, grasping her forearms and forcing a harsh, punishing kiss on her lips. Bonnie is so shocked that for a moment she goes completely still, allowing his mouth to caress hers shamelessly. There’s an instant of pure elation when his tongue tries to slide in to deepen the kiss, but then she remembers why this is so wrong and impossible and should never happen again. She telekinetically throws him across the room and against the wall, hard.

The idiot just laughs as she wipes her lips. “Are you out of your fucking mind? What the hell it was that?”

“A kiss,” he smirks cockily, his body language far too reminiscent of their first face to face at a certain Halloween fair years ago, “and you enjoyed it.”

“You are delusional, and so is Elena if she thinks you can keep it in your pants long enough to have a serious relationship with her.”

If the witch had hoped that her best friend’s mention would have distracted him from the point he was set on making, then it was clear from the unfaltering bravado all over his visage that her plan had failed.

“Jealous, love?”

 _Love,_ he calls her and it’s for the mockery of that word that she thinks she will never forgive him. She might hate him more than she ever has before, because it’s cruel and unfair and nothing she deserves after all she has forgiven him for.

“Run to your girlfriend, asshole and explain to her what you’ve just done before I do,” she hisses even if ‘ _I’m not your love, I’m not your anything’_ dances childishly on her tongue. How pathetic is it that bringing up Elena is still the one way she has to hurt him back?

“Tell her yourself,” his widening grin is predatory, shark-like, and the manic glint in his gaze? It’s not Reformed-Damon at all. “And don’t forget to add how long we had it coming and how good it was.”

At that point Bonnie completely loses it.

“You’re a raving lunatic!” she screams, waving her arms furiously, ever so tempted to end his miserable life. “What the fuck you want from me?”

Damon suddenly becomes dead serious at that, like the question was what he was waiting for all along, and he was just playing on her nerves to get there. Which confirms, inevitably, that he might be the most delirious psychotic case she has ever had the misfortune of meeting.

“I want you to find Stefan for me with your witchy juju before you go anywhere. I want you to boss him into coming back and taking back what belongs to him, because Elena and I are bored stiff with each other already. Tell him that she needs him and I don’t need her _nearly_ as much as I thought.”

Frighteningly enough Damon looks like he means what he says, and the expectant expression he with which he addresses her does not falter. It doesn’t matter how hard Bonnie stares him down, her visage carefully and intentionally blank as she wills herself to see through his bold facade.

“I’m not _enabling_ you in whatever mind game you’re setting up for your brother and girlfriend,” the witch hisses, pushing her anger and humiliation so deep that she can’t feel them choking her anymore. “Find another way to fix your relationship issues.”

It has to be a game, she is sure. A final manipulation to convince Elena that she has made the right choice by choosing the older, nastier brother and to smack that victory in Stefan’s face.

And it sickens her, really, that she can love someone who destroys others so effortlessly just to make himself feel better or just to have what he wants how he wants it.

Bonnie is still convinced that there has to be something wrong with her if she can have such visceral feelings for such a sadistic madman. This is what scares her most about her attraction to Damon: not the unrequited nature of her feelings, but what it says about _her_ nature. Thus, her fear should soften the rejection’s blow but it doesn’t. It hurts, and she may choose to not analyze that hurt and its source, but she can’t stop experiencing it.

Damon regales her with one of those twitchy, blatantly insane looks he sometimes uses. “I know that your head explodes when you try to take me at face value, but I’m not playing you, them or even myself. I’m fixing the mess I made before we all go insane. Judge _that_ if you can, Miss Self-Righteous-And-Perfect.”

And then he is looking at her again like he did that day at the Founder’s Day Parade, blue eyes serious and features earnest instead of maniacal. It makes the witch want to scream _and_ melt, run away _and_ get closer. It makes her confused and scared, and she needs to take a deep breath in, strive to even out her heartbeat, all too aware than he can notice its sudden, frantic increase.

“And you thought I would cave in more easily if you kissed me and upset Elena?”

She tries to sound sarcastic, uncaring and she laughs it off condescendingly so he won’t see the cracks on her stupid, misguided heart.

“I kissed you because I _wanted_ to, and because you wanted me to do that whether you know it or not. We got a lot of sexual frustration to unleash on each other, Bennett.”

“I bet that’s what all the abusers say.” Bonnie’s answer is rushed and breezy, a chilly smile forced on her lips. “I will grant your wish anyway, for _Stefan_.”

\--

In the end, Bonnie postpones her trip by a few days, and she manages to both localize Stefan and do some dream-walking pep-talk for his benefit. It takes 3 efforts before she convinces him that his place is in Mystic Falls, and when he eventually nods and assures her that he is going to come home, she knows it’s not a lie.

That certainty puts something inside to rest as she starts packing again: Elena will be okay and well-taken care of, and Bonnie can finally move forward with her life without any guilt.

The morning as she waits for Caroline to pick her up, her jaw drops when she spots Damon’s shiny, black mustang in her backyard.

“He blackmailed me into letting him tag along,” Caroline admits with an annoyed pout, and Bonnie could argue, threaten, or cause bodily harm. Instead she slates a wary glance to Damon’s naughty-boy-mask and makes herself comfortable inside the damned car.

Damon Salvatore is not hers, but maybe he wants to be, and maybe she needs to give him a chance to demonstrate it. For closure’s sake if anything else.


End file.
